Welcome to the QuickPlay homepage. QuickPlay is a windows-only powerful universal emulator
'frontend-of-frontends', which has support for countless emulators and systems, old and new, with a philosophy of being quick and easy for new users, yet comprehensive and flexible for old-timers. It was written in the heyday of RAD and OO frontends (as such it's written in Delphi), and like other frontends of the time, its very powerful and able to support considerable complexity and customisation (think MAMEUI, but on steroids). However unlike many other frontends of the time, its also very flexible and adaptable, and still updated by enthusiastic supporters. It takes a fresh approach to the backend which, in particular, gives blisteringly-fast search over large and diverse romsets.
Its creator, John Scott (wherever you are), came up with the idea of EMU-Finder files and scans, which have stood the test of time and proved to be immensely powerful. To date i think that QuickPlay supports the most emulators, multi-emulators, and other frontends (MAME, MESS, RetroArch, Gamebase, Mednafen, BlueMSX, WinUAELoader, and others). It also favors archived roms (7zip, the Good sets in particular) and incorporates a Multiloader disk loader for all kinds of CD/DVD-based systems, no matter how you compress them, and Tempest's ROMDATA files, giving auto-game information for a great many 80's and 90's systems.
Quickplay is quite a different proposition than other retro-frontends as it favours functionality and simplicity over looks - you'll find thoroughness and consideration for users here, rather than gameplay videos and logos

News

QuickPlay 4.6.0 is released

Mame softlists: other game names functionality: Mame made some mistakes:

mamenames for games are unique per-machine's device, not unique per machine as they should be (smb2 could be both a flop for the Jap version and a cart for the US version, so what happens when you call mame famicom smb2?)

mamename loading (without specifying device) does nice things like multi-disc loading. If you do specify device, no nice things

its hard to tell when you have a name conflice, which device will be treated as the 'default' So, to load the correct game, we look for exceptional game name conflicts between the original softlists for a system. If we find conflicts, only then do we override the mame call by specifying device

fix some other issues found to get more games working in mame, in particular:

the custom calls needed for the nes_ and snes_ 'special cartridge' softlists

forcing up the rating of certain emulators for a system, to make sure games load easier, in particular msx1_flop, where a late Brazilian variant loads double-density disks, and msx2p, where the previous default emus required you to know Japanese to load a game

make image fit in thumbnail media panel view...

add back and next buttons for image viewer

update and tweak the RetroArch efind, many additions and fixes to take up to RetroArch 1.6.9

stop multiloader using deamon tools to mount zips (turns out it was VERY slow, often in-game, just always unzip)

refresh mednafen efinds (add mednafen saturn)

Posted by butter100fly on 10-02-2018

QuickPlay 4.5.0 is released

QuickPlay - MAME Edition entirely reworks all previous MAME/RetroArch MAME/MESS/UME functionality. Its one of the largest changes to QuickPlay that has been made. If you already have MAME or RetroArch's MAME working fine outside of QuickPlay, it should now be easy to make the MAME lists of your dreams for Arcade, Home Computer and Console games. It also makes QuickPlay work really well with 2K and high-DPI monitors, fixes joypad support, and contains numerous fixes for other UI elements and annoying quirks that help to make QuickPlay a great MAME frontend. The release goes with a major revamp of the QuickPlay web content aimed at helping new users get playing quickly - see the refreshed and very-visual wiki documentation

Joypad Support

Re-implement joypad support (so that it works!) with Windows messaging implementation for a much more responsive joypad

now keeps track of the version of MAME used to generate Efind/Softlists (visible in MAME Options)

removed the old 'tool' that moved the canned softlists to users data dir

Posted by butter100fly on 02-12-2017

QuickPlay 4.2.2 is released

updated daemon tools command line for dt 10.6...we still are going to pre-mount a K:/ SCSI drive (though DT now has many other mounting possibilities), but its a LOT faster now...

fix github lost spaces in markdown

multithreading long-since defunct mame options

ordered the arcade efind

make picture on readme reappear on github

consistent naming of atari-8bit

Posted by butter100fly on 13-11-2017

QuickPlay 4.2.1 is released

updated defaults system list and default extensions for systems

various efind tweaks to support mame-mess-retroarch

Retroarch non-mess emus renamed to fit better with mess

set of efinds for mess-related uis

fixup type namings

fixed error in updates script

real icons set to small icons

add folder location to softlists, you can mass-edit to get real icons

Made an embedded systems romdata for mame-mess, "the batman" is back!

corrected redirect, MESS now included

readmes for the softlists

add sourcecode for movers

fixed welcome description of utils menu

Posted by butter100fly on 16-05-2017

QuickPlay 4.2.0 is released

Yeah there's a list of stuff below, but this release is about making MESS (I mean MAME and RetroArch-MAME's non-arcade systems) finally work well. There's new efinds and data folders targeted at thse two emulators. I'm pretty happy with it and so big is the effect on QuickPlay when you've set these up we're going to a new minor version - 4.2. Read about it on the wiki here: http://quickplay.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/MESS
In particular existing users note the instructions on that page about updating - there's now an updates folder. If you want the new MAME/RetroArch stuff then please follow it

new systems dat in resources - even corrects some names MAME/MESS got wrong